SO LONG, GERRY
The Gerald Garson bribery trial has, mercifully, drawn to a close. The New York Law Journal has a comprehensive look at how a Brooklyn jury relied on extensive surveillance evidence to convict the former judge, 74, of accepting thousands of dollars from ex-attorney and prosecution witness Paul Siminovsky – who himself has been disbarred for receiving bribes – in exchange for ex parte help on one of his cases and lucrative law guardianships. But Garson, who faces 15 years in prison when he is sentenced on June 5th, was acquitted of four other counts of receiving rewards for official misconduct, all connected to his receipt of payments for having referred cases to Siminovsky. The trial judge, Acting Supreme Court Justice Jeffrey Berry, released Garson on $15,000 bail pending sentencing and appeal. Last September, Mr. Garson rejected a plea that would have sent him to prison for no more than 16 months, forcing his original attorney, Ronald P. Fischetti, to resign the case due to "irreconcilable differences." Bribery aside, the tapes portrayed Garson as offensive and sexist: "…One of the greatest things about this job is that I don't know what the f*** I have tomorrow until I get here and I don't give a s*** either," he said at one point. In another exerpt he called an Orthodox Jewish man as a "yammy."


27 YEARS FOR FREEDOM
A contentious 27-year court battle over housing segregation in the Bronx finally ended in a settlement yesterday. The lawsuit, filed by the NAACP, focused on 800 units of public housing in predominately white east Yonkers that were intended to house minorities but were bitterly contested by the city government. A larger issue was the borough’s pattern of racial discrimination in its housing policies, which Justice Sand exposed in a ruling against Yonkers in 1985 that seemed to pave the way for a settlement, only for the City Council to opt for a long, expensive legal showdown. The New York Times tells how Supreme Court Justice Leonard B. Sand – who has presided over the case since its inception, when he’d been on the bench for only a year – will review the final settlement in early May. “Any efforts not to comply with the law are counterproductive to the image of the community and its well-being.” Justice Sand said. “The millions and millions of dollars that the City of Yonkers has spent” in this litigation “could have gone to better things for the community.”


V IS FOR VACCO, V IS FOR VENDETTA
An Albany judge allowed a state oversight agency investigating the activities of a lobbying firm led by former state Attorney General Dennis Vacco to carry out a subpoena issued to the firm’s attorney, even though there’s evidence to suspect he’s the victim of a personal vendetta by the state agency’s executive director, David Grandeau. As reported in The Buffalo News, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Teresi ruled that Crane and Vacco’s attorney, James Crane (the husband of Constance Crane, Vacco’s business partner) must oblige the subpoena because his vendetta claim is “irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the subpoena is enforceable” and because the state lobbying commission may proceed with its probe as long as the material being sought is relevant to its investigation. As reported by The News, this week investigators from the commission recommended $325,000 in fines against Vacco’s firm over allegations that it entered into an illegal contingency-fee arrangement with a Rochester businessman seeking to build casinos with an Oklahoma Indian tribe. Last year, the Albany County District Attorney cleared the Vacco firm of any wrongdoing.